If your portfolio holds XEQT, your brokerage shows one line item. But that single ticker contains over 9,000 stocks spanning technology, financials, energy, healthcare, and more — across dozens of countries. Without sector look-through, you have no idea what you actually own. Here is what ETF decomposition means, why it matters for Canadian DIY investors, and how WealthWise automatically pierces the wrapper to show your real sector exposure.
All-in-one ETFs like XEQT (iShares Core Equity ETF Portfolio) and VEQT (Vanguard All-Equity ETF Portfolio) have become the default recommendation for Canadian investors who want instant global diversification at a low cost. Buy one ticker, hold forever — the pitch is beautifully simple.
But that simplicity creates a blind spot. When your brokerage or portfolio tracker shows XEQT: $42,000 (1 holding), it is technically accurate and practically useless. You do not know:
This is the black-box problem. And it affects every investor who holds a fund of funds — which, in Canada, means a huge share of the DIY investing community.
Sector look-through — sometimes called ETF decomposition or transparency — is the process of peering inside an ETF wrapper and attributing its underlying holdings to recognizable economic sectors: Technology, Financials, Energy, Healthcare, Consumer Discretionary, and so on.
The standard framework most tools use is the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), which divides the economy into 11 sectors. When you apply look-through to XEQT, you are not just tagging XEQT as one entity. You are asking: "Of XEQT's actual component stocks — Apple, Shopify, Royal Bank, Toyota — what sector does each belong to, and how much of my dollar ends up in each bucket?"
XEQT does not directly hold individual stocks. It holds four other iShares ETFs: XAW (global ex-Canada), XIC (Canadian equities), an international developed-markets fund, and an emerging-markets fund. Each of those sub-funds holds dozens to thousands of individual stocks.
True look-through requires recursive decomposition: unwrap XEQT into its four sub-ETFs, then unwrap each sub-ETF into its holdings, then assign each holding a sector weight. Miss any level of that recursion and your sector allocation is distorted or meaningless.
Most brokerages stop at the first layer. WealthWise goes all the way down.
WealthWise's sector allocation feature is free and automatic. When you connect your broker via SnapTrade read-only sync or import a CSV, WealthWise recognizes ETF tickers and fetches their current top holdings and sector weights from live data sources.
For each ETF position in your portfolio, the system:
The result: instead of "XEQT 100%", your sector view shows something like Technology 22%, Financials 18%, Industrials 11%, Healthcare 10%, Energy 7% — the real picture of where your money is deployed.
Look-through becomes especially powerful when you hold both ETFs and individual stocks. Suppose you own XEQT plus shares in Royal Bank of Canada and Brookfield Asset Management. Without look-through, your brokerage shows three holdings with no sector context. With look-through, WealthWise might reveal that you already have 20% financial-sector exposure inside XEQT — so adding RBC and Brookfield pushes your financial-sector weight to 30% or more. That is a meaningful concentration that most tools would never flag.
For more on how overlap compounds across multiple ETFs, see our dedicated piece on ETF overlap between VFV and XEQT.
XEQT and VEQT are often described as interchangeable. Both are all-equity, globally diversified, all-in-one ETFs. But their underlying compositions differ enough to produce slightly different sector profiles.
| Sector | XEQT (approx.) | VEQT (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Technology | ~22% | ~20% |
| Financials | ~18% | ~20% |
| Industrials | ~11% | ~11% |
| Healthcare | ~10% | ~10% |
| Consumer Discretionary | ~9% | ~9% |
| Energy | ~7% | ~7% |
| Other | ~23% | ~23% |
Note: sector weights shift daily as markets move. Always check the ETF provider's fact sheet or your WealthWise dashboard for the most current breakdown.
The difference is subtle — but it matters if you are trying to tilt your portfolio intentionally. XEQT holds slightly more US-listed growth companies (higher tech weight); VEQT leans modestly more toward Canadian financials. If you already hold a Canadian bank ETF, VEQT's higher domestic financials weight could push you into unintended concentration faster. WealthWise's look-through surfaces exactly this kind of nuance. For a full comparison of these two ETFs, see our XEQT vs. VEQT vs. VFV deep dive.
| What your brokerage shows | What look-through reveals |
|---|---|
| XEQT: 1 holding | Over 9,000 stocks across technology, financials, energy, healthcare, and more |
| No sector detail | GICS framework splits the economy into 11 sectors |
| A single Canadian equity ETF (e.g., XIC) line item | Big Six banks + pipeline/mining ≈ 60% of the Canadian equity index |
Canadian index investors face a structural quirk: the TSX is heavily concentrated in financials and energy. The Big Six banks plus a handful of pipeline and mining companies represent roughly 60% of the Canadian equity index. If you hold XIC or a Canadian equity ETF alongside a global all-in-one, your real financial-sector exposure is almost certainly higher than you think.
Look-through makes this visible. It lets you answer questions like:
These are not hypothetical questions. The 2022 rate-hike cycle hit financial and real-estate sectors hard while energy surged. Investors who knew their sector exposures could make informed decisions; those flying blind could not.
Once your portfolio is connected or imported, navigate to the Analysis tab in WealthWise and select Sector Allocation. You will see:
The look-through view is the default because it is the accurate one. The face-value view is retained for reference but is almost always misleading for ETF-heavy portfolios.
WealthWise is free and works as a read-only companion to Wealthsimple, Questrade, Disnat, and other Canadian brokers — it never executes trades or touches your accounts. If you are already tracking dividends or benchmarking against the S&P 500 inside WealthWise, sector allocation is part of the same unified dashboard. You can also pair the sector view with the portfolio concentration risk score to get a quantified sense of how diversified your holdings truly are.
ETF holdings are published by fund providers on a daily or monthly basis depending on the fund. WealthWise updates sector data regularly, but there is always a short lag between a fund's portfolio changes and when look-through data reflects them. For the vast majority of passive index ETFs, this lag is inconsequential — the sector profile of XEQT does not change dramatically week to week. For actively managed ETFs, check the provider's website for the most current holdings disclosure.
Look-through means decomposing an ETF into its underlying stock holdings and attributing those holdings to economic sectors (Technology, Financials, Energy, etc.) rather than treating the ETF as a single, opaque holding. This gives you a true picture of your sector exposure.
Yes. WealthWise automatically applies recursive look-through for all-in-one ETFs like XEQT and VEQT, unwrapping each layer of sub-funds to produce a real sector breakdown weighted by your actual dollar holdings.
Most brokerages report the face-value holding (e.g., 'XEQT: 100% of this line item') without decomposing into underlying sectors. WealthWise applies look-through so your sector chart reflects what is actually inside every ETF in your portfolio.
Yes. Sector look-through and allocation analysis are free features available to all WealthWise users. WealthWise is a free companion tool for Canadian DIY investors using Wealthsimple, Questrade, Disnat, and other brokers.
WealthWise refreshes ETF sector data regularly from published fund holdings. For passive index ETFs, the sector profile is relatively stable; major shifts are rare. For time-sensitive decisions, always cross-reference the ETF provider's official fact sheet.
Start with WealthWise for free →Educational content. Figures and rules verified against the official sources above; tax amounts change annually.
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